A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
